Imagination: What You Need To Thrive In The Future Economy

Rita J. King is the EVP of Business Development at Science House, where she works with clients to shape the new global culture and economy -- whether by brainstorming and implementing ideas or creating memorable, one-of-kind event experiences for customers, employees, or the public. She's also a Senior Fellow of Social Networking and Immersive Technologies at the Center of the Study of the Presidency and Congress and Futurist at NASA Langley's think tank, the National Institute of Aerospace.

Science House is the brainchild of entrepreneur and investor, James Jorasch. Its foundation currently operates in over 20 countries, sparking kids’ imaginations for science, and its investment arm has backed a number of science, math, and tech-driven startups, including Quartzy, which spent last summer at Y Combinator in Silicon Valley.

In this interview, Rita explains the need to design machines that preserve our humanity and suggests ways to prepare for the Imagination Age, a major economic shift that's already underway. Shes strikes me as the consummate creative generalist.

We've talked about the similarities between entrepreneurs and artists. But what about scientists -- what can art and science learn from each other?

Andy Warhol said that being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.

It isn’t enough for an entrepreneur who wants to play a role in shaping the future to just be an artist. It is necessary to be truly avant-garde. Artists and scientists have long been on a quest to understand reality in many dimensions. Knowledge is getting more complex.

Along with boundless curiosity, scientists and artists share another common bond: being attacked by their peers for successfully reaching the public imagination. Carl Sagan was criticized by some for trying to popularize science. Why did he waste time on television when the lab requires rigorous focus? In the art world, artists who sell their work are often accused of “selling out.”

This kind of professional jealousy is often cloaked as concern, which implies that practitioners should toil in obscurity or that the public should be able to divine what’s happening without any approachable information being shared. As Sagan pointed out, taxpayers foot the bill for a lot of the scientific research being conducted in the US, so getting the public excited about science is in the best interest of the field.

What do you mean when you say that the world is entering the Imagination Age?

The Imagination Age is a way to define the period in which we currently live, between the fading Industrial Era and the coming Intelligence Era, in which machines will be smarter than people.

In the Imagination Age, we can collectively imagine and create the future we want to inhabit before we lose that chance. This isn't just about generating utopian visions to make ourselves feel better about the challenges we face. We can rapidly prototype and test ideas to alter our systems and lives.

The central question of the Imagination Age is: What does it mean to be human? This question is not easy to answer, but if we're going to guide our own evolution and preserve some aspect of our humanity in the machines we will create, we have to try. Currently, we view technology as separate from us. Soon enough we will be integrated in ways we can barely imagine now.

Intelligence is an emerging characteristic of the infinite cosmos. There's no such thing as artificial intelligence, just an increase in our knowledge and ability to use it. In the Imagination Age, we can start to understand what this really means.

So why is so much of today’s innovation unimaginative?

It’s easy for investors to understand businesses that simply copy aspects of Facebook, Pinterest, or Groupon. It’s much more difficult to understand new ideas or complex scientific concepts and creatively envision ways such intellectual property can be turned into a viable business, perhaps in a completely unexpected industry. Maybe a special nano-material intended for use in a spacecraft also has a medical purpose, for example.

The ability to take a creative idea all the way through from your brain to the market successfully is a very complex process. You have to have a plan, investors, a team and ultimately the ability to develop, connect with and deliver to a customer base. It’s easier to copy an established path than to create a new one. That’s true for entrepreneurs and investors alike.

How is our education system failing to prepare students for this shift?

For a couple of years before we came to Science House, Joshua Fouts and I worked on a project called Imagination: Creating the Future of Education and Work. We learned that while the system remains focused on Industrial Era requirements, there are a lot of educators out there who realize that the system isn’t transforming quickly enough. They are doing what they can to help students prepare for the reality of a collaborative future.

People born with the ability to interact and collaborate will not revert back to being locked in their own heads, tested on an individual basis. Look at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Thousands of scientists from over 100 countries collaborated on the experiment to verify the Higgs boson.

The classroom is no longer four walls and a ceiling occupied by a tiny sliver of the population. It is the beginning of a cosmically interconnected journey toward the future.

What skills are needed most to thrive in the Imagination Age?

Balance between the individual and the group is necessary for meaningful collaboration. Creative problem solvers and people who can code or generate insight from data sets will be in high demand. Risk taking is required, as is pursuing curiosity. Discipline and fun should go hand in hand. Resilience is a necessity for navigating rapid transformation, as is personal reinvention. The ability to improvise is helpful in all situations.

People with vision who can connect with other cultures on a deep level are needed in the Imagination Age, as are those who can do a lot with a little and communicate their ideas with clarity and passion. Mostly, the shape of the future is reliant on the ability to think ahead. In the Imagination Age, we are attempting to create the future we can imagine.

Some say the future is already predetermined, as a result of our short-sightedness, with water full of toxic waste and maybe even combative robots who see humans as a scourge on the tiny blue planet that we share. That’s one possible future vision, but it’s not the one I see in my imagination. It is possible that with our best, most focused efforts, we might end up collaboratively creating something even more spectacular than what we can envision.

I founded the innovation lab Neek to prototype products, services, and systems that further empower everyday workers. Our first product is a mobile app of peer-to-peer recommendations that help automotive technicians invest in tools that increase their income. Previously I o...